In Art and Agency, Alfred Gell formulates an anthropological theory of visual art that focuses on the social context of art production, circulation, and reception. As a theory of the nexus of social relations involving works of art, this work suggests that in certain contexts, art-objects substitute for persons and thus mediate social agency. Diversely illustrated and based on European, Polynesian, Melanesian, and Australian sources, Art and Agency was completed just before Gell's death at the age of fifty-one in January 1997. It embodies the intellectual bravura, lively wit, vigor, and erudition for which he was admired, and will stand as an enduring testament to one of the most gifted anthropologists of his generation.

In Art Effects Carlos Fausto explores the interplay between indigenous material culture and ontology in ritual contexts, interpreting the agency of artifacts and indigenous presences and addressing major themes in anthropological theory and art history to study ritual images in the widest sense. Fausto delves into analyses of the body, aerophones, ritual masks, and anthropomorphic effigies while making a broad comparison between Amerindian visual regimes and the Christian imagistic tradition. Drawing on his extensive fieldwork in Amazonia, Fausto offers a rich tapestry of inductive theorizing in understanding anthropology’s most complex subjects of analysis, such as praxis and materiality, ontology and belief, the power of images and mimesis, anthropomorphism and zoomorphism, and animism and posthumanism. Art Effects also brims with suggestive, hemispheric comparisons of South American and North American indigenous masks. In this tantalizing interdisciplinary work with echoes of Franz Boas, Pierre Clastres, and Claude Lévi-Strauss, among others, Fausto asks: how do objects and ritual images acquire their efficacy and affect human beings?

This book draws on the work of anthropologist Alfred Gell to reinstate the importance of the object in art and society. Rather than presenting art as a passive recipient of the artist's intention and the audience's critique, the authors consider it in the social environment of its production and reception. A Return to the Object introduces the historical and theoretical framework out of which an anthropology of art has emerged, and examines the conditions under which it has renewed interest. It also explores what art 'does' as a social and cultural phenomenon, and how it can impact alternative ways of organising and managing knowledge. Making use of ethnography, museological practice, the intellectual history of the arts and sciences, material culture studies and intangible heritage, the authors present a case for the re-orientation of current conversations surrounding the anthropology of art and social theory. This text will be of key interest to students and scholars in the social and historical sciences, arts and humanities, and cognitive sciences.

Esta publicación es fruto de la reflexión de, fundamentalmente, docentes del ámbito de la comunicación y de la publicidad basada en la necesidad de aunar fuerzas para ofrecer una obra de conjunto que intenta ver la publicidad como un hecho global y no solo aislado de la comunicación comercial. La presente obra profundiza en el valor de la publicidad y su importancia contemporánea, desde una perspectiva holística y con el objetivo de querer ser una publicación didáctica y de reflexión.

Art troubles anthropology. Anthropologists have often taken a philistine, sceptical position of distance towards art and aesthetics as a predominantly Western bourgeois institution. But art, not only as a Western institution, generated its own philistine and iconoclastic revisions and undoings, its anti-art, that have engaged anthropology into its theory and practice. Anthropology is thus part of the trouble with art. But trouble doesn’t necessarily obfuscate, it can also reveal and render visible fault lines and problems; troubles can be assemblages of disparate and even contradictory parts that paradoxically do work together. This volume proposes an anthropology that moves beyond philistinism and the contradictions between critical anthropologies of art and collaborative and experimental anthropologies with art.

Catalogue of art works selected from the more than 110 emerging artists from the region who participated in the 2nd Central American Exhibition of Emerging Art. Prized names included: Marcos Agudelo (Nicaragua, Canada, Video project, 2006), Miguel Fábrega (Panamá, Alicia en el país de las maravillas, painting, 2006) and Dios es Dior (digital photography, 2006), Marco Luque (Panamá, Control demográfico, digital prints, 2006), Celeste Ponce (Honduras) Ser piente / Es cooltura (intervened objects, 2006), Ángel Poyon (Guatemala), Área de traslado (drawings, 2006), Sandra Trejos (Costa Rica, Puerta de Brandemburgo: 60 años, digital photography, 2006) with special mentions for José Campos (Costa Rica, Stand modelo de la 1ra feria de las no-transnacionales, photo-installation, 2006), Eduardo Chang (El Salvador, Made in Chang, digital photography, 2006), Ana Urquilla (El Salvador, Quisiera dejar de comerme las uñas para ser más bonita y poder conseguir marido, photography, 2006), Francesco Bracci (Costa Rica, Balance y Contraste, intervention in the Municipal Park of La Sabana (metal & nylon, 2006).